The present invention pertains to the telephone equipment art and, more particularly, to a telephone control system which allows subscribers to provide a plurality of call handling utilities to predeterminedly direct incoming calls. Even more particularly, the telephone control system allows subscribers to provide a branch routing function to callers to the system, permitting the callers to select one of a plurality destinations to which they wish to have their call transferred.
Despite the availability of numerous telephone central exchange provided functions, such as "call-forwarding", "three-way calling", "call-waiting" and "speed-dialing", as well as the advent and availability of paging and mobile telephone systems, the completion of a call to a system subscriber can often be a complicated, time consuming and tedious task. Unless the telephone subscriber is located at the telephone which receives calls to his assigned phone number, completion of a call from a calling party, despite the aforementioned services, generally involves the calling party leaving a message and awaiting a call back by the subscriber. Even if the subscriber is accessible via mobile telephone or a paging system, human intervention is commonly required to look up and dial specific mobile telephone or paging numbers to attempt to contact the subscriber. Thus, additional delays and costs are incurred.
In addition, even if the subscriber is on a paging system, the successful direction of a message to the subscriber requires that the subscriber manually inform the system of his whereabouts.
Finally, existing telephone control systems offer very limited control to either the subscriber or the calling party with respect to the processing of calls. In particular, prior art telephone control systems have not provided a means to allow a caller to select from among a plurality of specific routes to which his call could be branched.